


Syntagma

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (of course), Banned Together Bingo 2020, Fictional Religion & Theology, Forsaken continues to be the god of unilateral boundaries honestly, Gen, I ship this like DHL Express but I doubt it’s all that obvious in the text so “&”/implied tags it is, Local Man Hates All His Friends; Is Technically Still Human: Hates This Also, Now with more spooky Judaism!, Religious Conflict, Technically a Leitner Book but Pre-Leitner, This is a Leitner, Trans Jonah Magnus, also Jonah’s background is ‘Christian (salty)’ and it… shows, and also, can be read as standalone but i would advise reading notes, less obvious in terms of background but meaningful btw:, not necessary to read the others in the series, unconventional forms of emotional intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28445337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Jonah feels no small amount of trepidation laying hands on the book, though he takes care not to let it show at all – or as close as can be hoped for – on his face; it’s cost him much more effort to get this far than he could countenance risking with any sign of reluctance or doubt, and nor is he interested in offering Mordechai or his god such a blatant gift of fear.In which Jonah tries to read something which doesn’t belong to him.
Relationships: Mordechai Lukas & Jonah Magnus, Mordechai Lukas/Jonah Magnus (implied)
Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1217580
Kudos: 7
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Syntagma

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lontradiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lontradiction/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Silence of Babel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16398497) by [lontradiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lontradiction/pseuds/lontradiction). 



> Inspired by the BTB prompt “`Poor Grammar`”, which isn’t quite what’s happening here, and also by my enduring love for the fic it’s based on. Will presumably make more sense if you read _Silence of Babel_ itself first, given the subject matter; otherwise, standalone one-shot.

Jonah feels no small amount of trepidation laying hands on the book, though he takes care not to let it show at all – or as close as can be hoped for – on his face; it’s cost him much more effort to get this far than he could countenance risking with any sign of reluctance or doubt, and nor is he interested in offering Mordechai or his god such a blatant gift of fear. (He’d imagine the man himself already has some idea regardless, even without the stare fixed on him accordingly, which would have many meanings, which presumably to varying degrees still does.) Jonah shows as much respect as he has in him – if it’s not reverence then no one could have expected otherwise, not reasonably – in the quiet, cautious press of hands where his instinct is naturally to devour, and Mordechai seems satisfied enough with that, for the time being.

The book is deceptively normal-looking in Mordechai’s hands, and so it feels immense in Jonah’s own; the craftsmanship goes without saying, and the heft and elegance should be inviting, the warm brown leather mundanely but viscerally satisfying; instead the weight is almost foreboding, a sense of solidity such that Jonah isn’t entirely sure the book will open for him at all, and while he knows the covers have red and gold in their undertones they seem to leach away that light instead to give the impression of a dull grey like smoke-blackened fog in winter. He would think, given this, that his fingertips might feel cold, not least given the predictable way that during the few times he’s been here before the air in Moorland House has seemed to steal warmth the way it swallows echoes regardless of the season. Instead he feels – nothing, an unnatural absence, such that for a moment he questions the point of trying to read.

But that, at least, is so sorely unlike him as to finally bring him back to himself, though Jonah’s sure his chagrin at the fact that this is what it took shows briefly on his face. He pays little mind to trying to read the precisely embossed covers; as if to stymie him just a touch further, they’re identical on both sides, which when his mind catches up to his pride Jonah supposes may indicate the prioritization of Hebrew text above the rest. That expectation has hardly troubled him, and in fact is part of why he’s surprised that Mordechai had _now_ offered to show Jonah what he’s given to understand is the equivalent of a family Bible, the artefact of his ‘little god’ that had given him such an unfair advantage when they’d first begun to discuss such things in earnest. 

Jonah can read – can understand – anything that living human memory might, by now, and even as this becomes mundane it manages to thrill him; behind him are the days of ostensibly benign comments about his egregious lack of German elsewhere or of having to wonder what Mordechai himself is saying when he – ostentatiously, if anything – does not in any way forget himself; why would Mordechai have opted to show Jonah this only once all hope of privacy should, if he’s thinking clearly, have eluded him? Among the few things Jonah cannot strictly read is Mordechai’s mind in his own home (it makes the novelty of visiting somewhat less engaging than it might be otherwise) and so he has to wonder instead, a curl of what may well become smugness circumscribing the thought: is Mordechai _curious?_

It is with that in mind that he actually opens it, setting the otherwise-unwieldy volume on his lap with care that Jonah does try to make obvious. He looks down expectantly; and then – instead – instead, he feels queerly and terribly ill.

He’s not sure what exactly he’s opened it on, though that’s something of a tertiary concern, and the hierarchal way the text is laid across the page may have fascinated him in another setting, some meaning and intent that’s obvious in the abstract, and perhaps he can see what Mordechai meant about the way the scripts should interact, if he strains, but— Jonah turns one page and then another, heedless of which way he should actually be doing so, because it evidently doesn’t _matter_ ; he feels a kind of pain that’s simultaneously sharp and dull begin to build in one temple, a high whine of incomprehension: the book doesn’t so much resist him as make it clear he would never have been noticed as an adversary to begin with, incomprehensible glyphs not bothering to swim or rearrange themselves as his eyes fail nonetheless to fix them in any way in his mind.

“I can’t read this,” Jonah admits, quietly, after a long enough moment that he’s sure Mordechai already knows – that he feels irrationally certain he’s being laughed at, though when he looks up, the face of the man who he will grudgingly admit to calling a friend is placid and almost blank, with only the usual level of sharp, polite interest in his eyes. “I am… sorry. I do mean no offence.”

“Can’t?” Mordechai asks, wholly neutral, his head tipping to the side slightly with what by all accounts is presumably earnest curiosity – though he moves with clearer intent than Jonah might otherwise expect in an innocuous setting, albeit still perfectly reasonable in a more generalized sense, to take the book back when Jonah offers it to him. “Given your tendencies I never expected that your god would be the envious sort.”

“It’s not,” Jonah says, too quickly, though if he flushes he does at least think it’s to a negligible extent, relatively speaking, with his complexion. “I don’t mean I refuse to. I mean… I mean that it’s contrived to be a language I can’t read at all.”

“Really.” Mordechai sounds neither surprised nor interested, though it’s clear enough to Jonah that he’s both. And perhaps a little smug. “That’s the opposite of what I’ve come to expect from בבל.”

“You mentioned.” Jonah folds his hands in his lap for lack of anything more interesting to do with them, and resents the fact of that with the rest. “It was… like trying to read in a dream. I could recognize the fact that there were glyphs I should be able to understand and I couldn’t grasp or put a name to a single one.” He levels a stare at Mordechai, though the man takes it amicably enough. “Presumably this is _your_ god being the jealous one, in fact. Selfishness would seem to be more typical there.”

“Reasonable enough,” Mordechai says, still so amicable that Jonah can feel the annoyance in not just his shoulders but his spine; it makes him do something unwise, as such things often do—

“It’s strange to me that your family is never present when I’m here, regardless of the circumstances,” Jonah says, prim enough as to have to call on etiquette he’d left behind a lifetime ago and direly impolite with it. “There’s so many of them that I’d expect to have noticed by now. Would you say you have something to hide, Mr Lukas?”

But that just makes him smile, with one sharp breath out like a laugh with everything that would make it laughter pre-emptively excised; and Jonah doesn’t actually mind as much as he should, he finds, but he stews in the annoyance some regardless, because there’s more than enough for the purpose. “Not hardly,” Mordechai says, easily. “You should know better than to assume you’d – Know, Jonah. It’s no fault but your own that my loved ones would want to avoid you, is it? Given who and what you are.”

Jonah feels his mouth draw up slightly at one corner. “I suppose that’s fair enough,” he says, with a more palatable kind of mildness, and does not opt to point out to Mordechai that he’s offered the presumably-accidental consolation prize of pointing Jonah towards where precisely to Look.

**Author's Note:**

> Here’s to 2021 as the year I finally finish and hazard publishing my… really quite vast tracts of Jonah character studies, how’s that. I’d like that.


End file.
